Are you “just” marketing?
Well, I have been told this. And if you’re like me, you are working extra hours, sweating through deadlines, consistently and proactively looking for new creative ideas, reading every new marketing book and studying trends daily on your spare time… and you will likely agree that hearing this stings a little.
Putting all emotions aside, it’s not really anyone’s fault that marketing is misunderstood. Advertising is perhaps the most obvious and popular form of marketing and is often perceived as the most glamorous. Also, if you’re really good at generating leads, their ubiquity might make people trivialize it. In B2B, many technical people might even consider marketing content “fluff” and presume there is no strategy behind the messaging, no consideration for the consumer decision-making process, no understanding of how a product needs to be communicated to consumers. Some might even think that marketing itself is futile.
Unlike engineers, software developers, lawyers, and doctors, for example, it isn’t always clear to people what marketing actually is and what marketers actually do. They will watch shows like Mad Men and presume a marketing department spends a day drinking whiskey and coming up with a slogan. People don’t know what we study in school: business development & strategies, pricing options, research, dynamic markets…
Marketing is everything that is done to place your product or service in the hands of consumers.
The most strategic marketers don’t only focus on promotion and advertising. They consider all four P’s of product marketing (Product, Place, Promotion and Prices), all seven P’s of services marketing (Product, Place, Promotion, Price, Physical Environment, People, Process), and today’s most important “P”: “people”. In a customer market orientation and in the customer experience era, “people” are now the key player in strategic marketing due to the surge of community building and the importance of customer relationship.
Furthermore, great marketers put a lot of emphasis on the three C’s (Customer, Competitor, Connections) and a segmented and targeted audience when positioning a product. Analyzing and building a strategy around the intersection of a company’s strengths, the needs of customers and the competitors’ offerings might seem simple, but can be extremely effective.
All this to say that, in the end, no matter what anyone says: you are not “just” marketing, but you are marketing: building the business growth and development strategy and determining the tactics to implement in order to meet business goals & objectives. You are the source behind the communications of your company’s product or service. You think about business in terms of customer needs and satisfaction. You help develop the demand for the product or service. You are, essentially, a key player in the success or failure of a company. It is your job to make the company successful. Pretty cool job.
